A Bandak
Biographic Data
| ID | 67881 |
|---|---|
| NAME | A Bandak |
| GIVEN NAMES | A |
| FAMILY NAME | Bandak |
| SIGNATURE | BANDAK A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Copenhagen |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3162-5313 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 37 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 224 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 36 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Viable Futures
This article explores how an anthropological engagement with the interplay between life, ways and worlds may afford us a framework for understanding what makes life viable and what is corrosive to attaining viability. Centrally, it advances an understanding of viability as pertaining to paths, roads and ways, as well as to life itself. Indeed, there can be no life without roads. The problem, however, is how to envisage these when any road forward…
Author Meets Critics
Porous Becomings
Angel Hair Anthropology with Michel Serres
The introduction argues for the advancement of anthropological theory through engagement with the work of Michel Serres. Particularly striking is the potentiality of porosity as a conceptual pivot to explore both Serres and ethnographic subjects. Touring Serres’s key works on time, religion, parasites, and ecology, the chapter argues that the porous becomings of interlocutors are best considered within the topological nexus of human–planetary con…
Portrait
I spent the first years of my life in Sudan where my father worked for the Sudan railways. I was proud to have a Daddy whose railway network stretched, over hundreds of miles, from the borders of Egypt to the savannahs and the great green swamps of the southern Nile. One of my first childhood memories is from 1937 when, at the ripe age of two, I respectfully fed my Mickey Mouse handkerchief to the resident hippopotamus in the Khartoum zoo
Re-Collections
In visual terms the ongoing war in Syria has been one of the most well-documented that the world has ever witnessed. Accordingly Syria has for long been established as a topos for global reflection and concern. Despite an excess of visual documentation of this war, the actual processes through which some images have come to capture, embody and produce what Syria was, is, and is to become still need further thought and engagement. The central clai…
Syrian futures
A key ambition of this introduction is to bring the question of temporality to the centre of anthropological engagements with Syria and the diverse legacies of the past thirteen years of upheaval. Engaging with temporality, tempo and tempus are central to this endeavour. How can we, as scholars, speak across the moving and malleable terrain of discrepant Syrian experiences that are themselves moving in time - that are speaking back to what happen…
Methods for the Future, Futures for Methods
What happens with data when the research process radically involves and engages those who are in the target group? How can we move towards collaborative insights by integrating our participants in the design of research, conduct of work, and, ultimately, its writing and dissemination? And how does this enable us to devise better futures when imagining such futures may be the very problem? Based on experimental research methods with Syrian refugee…
Around Andreas Bandak's Exemplary Life
Exemplarity is one of those startlingly interesting ideas that deserves to be up there with 'power' as a foundational concept for the social sciences. Exemplarity is memory, learning, and mimesis; it is self-recognition in the Other, and therefore key to theory of mind. One of the curious things about exemplarity is how pervasively we encounter it in its multiple, material, and ideational forms; as copies, repetitions, iterations, duplications, m…
Powers of religion
Simon Coleman is one of the most active and influential anthropologists of his generation. His anthropological work on religion, in particular, has become a reference point for many people working within the field. In this interview, Coleman talks for the first time about his own personal entry into the field of religion. Coleman also formulates what he sees as a genealogy of the anthropology of Christianity and links it to his broader views of t…
Crisis, urgency and the problem of discernment
Crises proliferate. Not just as labels but as the actual state of affairs, of impasse, ruination and breakdown. As an anthropologist working on Syria with extensive fieldwork inside the country before the uprising of 2011, and later with ongoing fieldwork in Lebanon, Jordan and with exiled Syrians in Europe, I find it safe to say that crisis is polyvalent. Crisis is slow and urgent as it moves with Syrians in time and across locations. This piece…
Limits, Genealogies, and Openings
This article, which introduces a special collection of articles, is intended to invite scholarly reflection on the study of religion in the present day. We believe that a meaningful conversation about what happens when we engage religion for scholarly purposes forces us to consider the ways in which the very category 'religion' shapes our research interests and scholarly communities. A focus on 'engagements' is furthermore useful as we seek an op…
Urgency and Imminence
From pre-emptive military strikes, humanitarian campaigns and precarious financial bubbles, to the climate change emergency and public health measures undertaken in response to COVID-19, we live in an era increasingly marked by discourses of imminence that bring a future close while also leaving it hard to imagine or inhabit. Claims of urgency - 'act now before it is too late!' - conduct the affective charge of these sometimes abject and often pa…
Jon Bialecki
Anmeldes af Andreas Bandak
Bøn
Forord
Introduction
This introduction presents an overview of the concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book aims to discuss the ways in which the poetics of waiting are intertwined with the politics of waiting, and furthermore, that in some cases the dimension may be what asks for more focused attention. It explores Palestinians in Oslo and their ways of acting on time and their situation of empty liminal being and introduces to a set of e…
Ethnographies of Waiting
Opulence and Simplicity
In various forms of Catholicism sacrifice holds a central position. The centrality of the divine sacrifice literally embodied in the sacrament of the Eucharist works in a wider sense as a model for action and thought outside the Church as a place for worship. Sacrifice here places the individual in various positions of moral debt that one can more-or-less willingly work towards suspending. In Damascus, Syria, a popular Catholic ethic of simplicit…
Prayer
In an anthropological examination, prayer may afford a fertile lens through which to explore what matters in socially discrepant environments as they are practiced in the mundane world of ordinary men and women, as well as among zealous practitioners and religious virtuosi. Prayer, however understood, may present ways to explore and conceive of religiosity without privileging a specific definition of religion itself. Generally, prayer points us t…
Different repetitions
It is a central contention of this special issue that an anthropological engagement with repetition has the capacity to open up fertile fields of comparative ethnographic and historical work. In this introduction, we link our approach to past anthropological and philosophical works, connecting for instance to discussions of historiography, rhythm, scale, and the characterization of experience. We move on to consider the present and future uses of…
Repetition and uncanny temporalities
This paper presents a meditation on how memory and repetition are played out when experienced as both a historical event and an ongoing and returning possibility. Amongst the Armenian community in Lebanon repetition takes on a particular salience in the form of a haunting from the foundational genocide of 1915, a genocide that in recent years has been brought back with the events in Syria where family and kin have faced severe hardships, random k…
Saints and Sainthood
Saints are central to personal devotion, as intercessors and mediators between humanity and God, and as models for emulation. Relationships with and images of saints and holy figures are by no means fixed but have developed, mirrored, and challenged different times and cultures. Sainthood is a precarious social process that entails both the saintly figure and an audience, and the process that establishes the claim to sainthood depends on mutual i…
Religion and Politics
Religion and politics provide an interesting juxtaposition. On one level, both may initially come across as rather self‐evident categories, with religion dealing with human perceptions and what people hold as sacred and politics addressing the control and governance of fellow human beings. Nonetheless, such a simple opposition should be only a starting point for an interrogation of both terms and how they have come to look and function as empiric…
Escalations
In this article, we explore what happens in qualitative terms when a social phenomenon accelerates in quantitative terms. We do so by introducing escalation as an analytical concept through which to understand sudden processes of accelerating change. Using the Danish cartoon controversy as the ethnographic prism, we show that accelerating dynamics may not only imply the quantitative growth of "things" but also that the qualitative scales underpin…
Opulence and Simplicity
In various forms of Catholicism sacrifice holds a central position. The centrality of the divine sacrifice literally embodied in the sacrament of the Eucharist works in a wider sense as a model for action and thought outside the Church as a place for worship. Sacrifice here places the individual in various positions of moral debt that one can more-or-less willingly work towards suspending. In Damascus, Syria, a popular Catholic ethic of simplicit…
Introduction
It is the contention of this introduction that examples are important prisms through which both reality and anthropological analysis are thought and, equally importantly, reconfigured. The aim of the introduction is to redress the theoretical disregard for exemplification by exploring the persuasive and evocative power - positive and negative - of 'examples' in social and academic life while also proposing exemplification as a distinct anthropolo…
Of Refrains and Rhythms in Contemporary Damascus
Christians in the Middle East have traditionally clustered around cities. As minorities in a Muslim majority context, difference manifests itself in many ways. In recent decades, the sounds of the city, in the form of calls to prayer from minarets and church bells, have increased, while green and blue lighting likewise crafts a plural setting that is not only audible but visible to all. In this article, I explore Christian ways of inhabiting the …
Exemplary series and Christian typology
In this paper, I explore the way in which examples are used in sermons among the pious followers of Our Lady of Soufanieh in Damascus, Syria. In the sermons, a particular logic of seriation functions to present specific models and exemplars as prisms of lives to be imitated. The framing of these lives takes place through entextualizations, whereby the life of some is made into texts that others are told to emulate. The process of making life into…
The Ends of Revolution
It is difficult to believe the level of disruption and despair that we are witnessing in the Middle East, from a broken Gaza, to a ruined Syria, a Yemen being bombed, a Libya in disintegration, and an Egypt on the slide toward state-centric fascism. These developments seem to be distantly removed from the days of Tahrir Square in early 2011, when people with elated spirits poured into the streets to demand a better political future. If the large-…
Escalations
In this article, we explore what happens in qualitative terms when a social phenomenon accelerates in quantitative terms. We do so by introducing escalation as an analytical concept through which to understand sudden processes of accelerating change. Using the Danish cartoon controversy as the ethnographic prism, we show that accelerating dynamics may not only imply the quantitative growth of "things" but also that the qualitative scales underpin…
The 'Orthodoxy' of Orthodoxy
This article uses ethnographic studies of Orthodox Christianities as a way to investigate the concept of 'orthodoxy' as it applies to religious worlds. Orthodoxy, we argue, is to be found neither in opposition to popular religion nor solely in institu- tional churches, but in a set of encompassing relations among clergy and lay people that amounts to a religious world and a shared tradition. These relations are characterized by correctness and de…
The social life of prayers - introduction
In this introduction the theme of prayer is brought into an anthropological discussion. Attending to prayers and how they are performed and seen to intervene in a social world is a significant way to engage with matters close to people. As argued in this introduction, prayers are a way to map affect and affective relationships people hold in what they are oriented towards and care about. Here a social perspective on prayer taking its cue from Mar…
Problems of Belief
This article examines the different effects Christianity has among Christians of Damascus. Instead of focusing on devout subjects, I trace out the ramifications Christianity has in different settings. Christianity sets different kinds of foregrounds and backgrounds which in this article are attended to during the Feast of the Holy Cross. During this Christian feast, a great variety of themes are brought into play with different kinds of relations…
Reckoning with the Inevitable
Since 15 March 2011, Syria has seen a humanitarian crisis escalate and we are now witnessing outright civil war in many parts of the country. From a relatively peaceful start, the whole affair has turned ugly. Bombs are exploding not just in remote parts of Syria but in its largest cities. Death and dying has now become a salient feature of Syrian life, both inside and outside its national borders. It is this salience of death and dying that I ex…
Urgency and Imminence
From pre-emptive military strikes, humanitarian campaigns and precarious financial bubbles, to the climate change emergency and public health measures undertaken in response to COVID-19, we live in an era increasingly marked by discourses of imminence that bring a future close while also leaving it hard to imagine or inhabit. Claims of urgency - 'act now before it is too late!' - conduct the affective charge of these sometimes abject and often pa…
Different repetitions
It is a central contention of this special issue that an anthropological engagement with repetition has the capacity to open up fertile fields of comparative ethnographic and historical work. In this introduction, we link our approach to past anthropological and philosophical works, connecting for instance to discussions of historiography, rhythm, scale, and the characterization of experience. We move on to consider the present and future uses of…
Repetition and uncanny temporalities
This paper presents a meditation on how memory and repetition are played out when experienced as both a historical event and an ongoing and returning possibility. Amongst the Armenian community in Lebanon repetition takes on a particular salience in the form of a haunting from the foundational genocide of 1915, a genocide that in recent years has been brought back with the events in Syria where family and kin have faced severe hardships, random k…
Repeated prayers
Mauss' seminal doctoral thesis, On Prayer [1909], captured the social character of prayer, but he sidelined the rosary as a merely mechanical prayer of repetition. This article also finds repetition at play in the rosary, as it is performed in the shrine of Our Lady of Soufanieh, Damascus, in pre-2011 Syria. However, it argues that repetition need not be conceptualised as dulling and inhibiting for the devotee. Rather, repetition can be seen like…
Foregrounds and Backgrounds - Ventures in the Anthropology of Christianity
In this introduction, we take our point of departure in the question: what difference does Christianity make? We argue that the anthropology of Christianity must encompass believers, skeptics and observers, in that the differences Christianity makes never are simple or singular. We pose the play between foregrounds and backgrounds as a viable way to venture, but argue that this must be paired with a focus on the particular assemblage made in and …
Re-Collections
In visual terms the ongoing war in Syria has been one of the most well-documented that the world has ever witnessed. Accordingly Syria has for long been established as a topos for global reflection and concern. Despite an excess of visual documentation of this war, the actual processes through which some images have come to capture, embody and produce what Syria was, is, and is to become still need further thought and engagement. The central clai…
Crisis, urgency and the problem of discernment
Crises proliferate. Not just as labels but as the actual state of affairs, of impasse, ruination and breakdown. As an anthropologist working on Syria with extensive fieldwork inside the country before the uprising of 2011, and later with ongoing fieldwork in Lebanon, Jordan and with exiled Syrians in Europe, I find it safe to say that crisis is polyvalent. Crisis is slow and urgent as it moves with Syrians in time and across locations. This piece…
Transvaluing Isis in Orthodox Christian-Majority Ethiopia
In anthropological works on collective violence, the term transvaluation refers to a process in which a particular conflict is reimagined on a higher scale, giving the conflict a general significance that can lead to wide-scale group violence. This article argues that by taking into account the varied iterations of transcendence and evaluation in transvaluative reframings, a reformulated concept of transvaluation can be used to understand the for…
Methods for the Future, Futures for Methods
What happens with data when the research process radically involves and engages those who are in the target group? How can we move towards collaborative insights by integrating our participants in the design of research, conduct of work, and, ultimately, its writing and dissemination? And how does this enable us to devise better futures when imagining such futures may be the very problem? Based on experimental research methods with Syrian refugee…
The Embodied Eye
Syrian futures
A key ambition of this introduction is to bring the question of temporality to the centre of anthropological engagements with Syria and the diverse legacies of the past thirteen years of upheaval. Engaging with temporality, tempo and tempus are central to this endeavour. How can we, as scholars, speak across the moving and malleable terrain of discrepant Syrian experiences that are themselves moving in time - that are speaking back to what happen…
Problems of Belief
This article examines the different effects Christianity has among Christians of Damascus. Instead of focusing on devout subjects, I trace out the ramifications Christianity has in different settings. Christianity sets different kinds of foregrounds and backgrounds which in this article are attended to during the Feast of the Holy Cross. During this Christian feast, a great variety of themes are brought into play with different kinds of relations…
Foregrounds and Backgrounds - Ventures in the Anthropology of Christianity
In this introduction, we take our point of departure in the question: what difference does Christianity make? We argue that the anthropology of Christianity must encompass believers, skeptics and observers, in that the differences Christianity makes never are simple or singular. We pose the play between foregrounds and backgrounds as a viable way to venture, but argue that this must be paired with a focus on the particular assemblage made in and …
The 'Orthodoxy' of Orthodoxy
This article uses ethnographic studies of Orthodox Christianities as a way to investigate the concept of 'orthodoxy' as it applies to religious worlds. Orthodoxy, we argue, is to be found neither in opposition to popular religion nor solely in institu- tional churches, but in a set of encompassing relations among clergy and lay people that amounts to a religious world and a shared tradition. These relations are characterized by correctness and de…
The Embodied Eye
Of Refrains and Rhythms in Contemporary Damascus
Christians in the Middle East have traditionally clustered around cities. As minorities in a Muslim majority context, difference manifests itself in many ways. In recent decades, the sounds of the city, in the form of calls to prayer from minarets and church bells, have increased, while green and blue lighting likewise crafts a plural setting that is not only audible but visible to all. In this article, I explore Christian ways of inhabiting the …
Introduction
It is the contention of this introduction that examples are important prisms through which both reality and anthropological analysis are thought and, equally importantly, reconfigured. The aim of the introduction is to redress the theoretical disregard for exemplification by exploring the persuasive and evocative power - positive and negative - of 'examples' in social and academic life while also proposing exemplification as a distinct anthropolo…
Exemplary series and Christian typology
In this paper, I explore the way in which examples are used in sermons among the pious followers of Our Lady of Soufanieh in Damascus, Syria. In the sermons, a particular logic of seriation functions to present specific models and exemplars as prisms of lives to be imitated. The framing of these lives takes place through entextualizations, whereby the life of some is made into texts that others are told to emulate. The process of making life into…
Reckoning with the Inevitable
Since 15 March 2011, Syria has seen a humanitarian crisis escalate and we are now witnessing outright civil war in many parts of the country. From a relatively peaceful start, the whole affair has turned ugly. Bombs are exploding not just in remote parts of Syria but in its largest cities. Death and dying has now become a salient feature of Syrian life, both inside and outside its national borders. It is this salience of death and dying that I ex…
Opulence and Simplicity
In various forms of Catholicism sacrifice holds a central position. The centrality of the divine sacrifice literally embodied in the sacrament of the Eucharist works in a wider sense as a model for action and thought outside the Church as a place for worship. Sacrifice here places the individual in various positions of moral debt that one can more-or-less willingly work towards suspending. In Damascus, Syria, a popular Catholic ethic of simplicit…
The Ends of Revolution
It is difficult to believe the level of disruption and despair that we are witnessing in the Middle East, from a broken Gaza, to a ruined Syria, a Yemen being bombed, a Libya in disintegration, and an Egypt on the slide toward state-centric fascism. These developments seem to be distantly removed from the days of Tahrir Square in early 2011, when people with elated spirits poured into the streets to demand a better political future. If the large-…
The social life of prayers - introduction
In this introduction the theme of prayer is brought into an anthropological discussion. Attending to prayers and how they are performed and seen to intervene in a social world is a significant way to engage with matters close to people. As argued in this introduction, prayers are a way to map affect and affective relationships people hold in what they are oriented towards and care about. Here a social perspective on prayer taking its cue from Mar…
Repeated prayers
Mauss' seminal doctoral thesis, On Prayer [1909], captured the social character of prayer, but he sidelined the rosary as a merely mechanical prayer of repetition. This article also finds repetition at play in the rosary, as it is performed in the shrine of Our Lady of Soufanieh, Damascus, in pre-2011 Syria. However, it argues that repetition need not be conceptualised as dulling and inhibiting for the devotee. Rather, repetition can be seen like…
Transvaluing Isis in Orthodox Christian-Majority Ethiopia
In anthropological works on collective violence, the term transvaluation refers to a process in which a particular conflict is reimagined on a higher scale, giving the conflict a general significance that can lead to wide-scale group violence. This article argues that by taking into account the varied iterations of transcendence and evaluation in transvaluative reframings, a reformulated concept of transvaluation can be used to understand the for…
Saints and Sainthood
Saints are central to personal devotion, as intercessors and mediators between humanity and God, and as models for emulation. Relationships with and images of saints and holy figures are by no means fixed but have developed, mirrored, and challenged different times and cultures. Sainthood is a precarious social process that entails both the saintly figure and an audience, and the process that establishes the claim to sainthood depends on mutual i…
Religion and Politics
Religion and politics provide an interesting juxtaposition. On one level, both may initially come across as rather self‐evident categories, with religion dealing with human perceptions and what people hold as sacred and politics addressing the control and governance of fellow human beings. Nonetheless, such a simple opposition should be only a starting point for an interrogation of both terms and how they have come to look and function as empiric…
Escalations
In this article, we explore what happens in qualitative terms when a social phenomenon accelerates in quantitative terms. We do so by introducing escalation as an analytical concept through which to understand sudden processes of accelerating change. Using the Danish cartoon controversy as the ethnographic prism, we show that accelerating dynamics may not only imply the quantitative growth of "things" but also that the qualitative scales underpin…
Opulence and Simplicity
In various forms of Catholicism sacrifice holds a central position. The centrality of the divine sacrifice literally embodied in the sacrament of the Eucharist works in a wider sense as a model for action and thought outside the Church as a place for worship. Sacrifice here places the individual in various positions of moral debt that one can more-or-less willingly work towards suspending. In Damascus, Syria, a popular Catholic ethic of simplicit…
Prayer
In an anthropological examination, prayer may afford a fertile lens through which to explore what matters in socially discrepant environments as they are practiced in the mundane world of ordinary men and women, as well as among zealous practitioners and religious virtuosi. Prayer, however understood, may present ways to explore and conceive of religiosity without privileging a specific definition of religion itself. Generally, prayer points us t…
Different repetitions
It is a central contention of this special issue that an anthropological engagement with repetition has the capacity to open up fertile fields of comparative ethnographic and historical work. In this introduction, we link our approach to past anthropological and philosophical works, connecting for instance to discussions of historiography, rhythm, scale, and the characterization of experience. We move on to consider the present and future uses of…
Repetition and uncanny temporalities
This paper presents a meditation on how memory and repetition are played out when experienced as both a historical event and an ongoing and returning possibility. Amongst the Armenian community in Lebanon repetition takes on a particular salience in the form of a haunting from the foundational genocide of 1915, a genocide that in recent years has been brought back with the events in Syria where family and kin have faced severe hardships, random k…
Introduction
This introduction presents an overview of the concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book aims to discuss the ways in which the poetics of waiting are intertwined with the politics of waiting, and furthermore, that in some cases the dimension may be what asks for more focused attention. It explores Palestinians in Oslo and their ways of acting on time and their situation of empty liminal being and introduces to a set of e…
Ethnographies of Waiting
Jon Bialecki
Anmeldes af Andreas Bandak
Bøn
Forord
Limits, Genealogies, and Openings
This article, which introduces a special collection of articles, is intended to invite scholarly reflection on the study of religion in the present day. We believe that a meaningful conversation about what happens when we engage religion for scholarly purposes forces us to consider the ways in which the very category 'religion' shapes our research interests and scholarly communities. A focus on 'engagements' is furthermore useful as we seek an op…
Philosophy (17 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Art (12 works) · Epistemology (12 works) · History (12 works) · History (11 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (9 works) · Anthropology (9 works) · Islamic Studies and History (8 works) · Philosophy (8 works)